Will Teenagers Disappear?

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Of all the great postwar inventions--television, rock 'n' roll, the Internet--the greatest and most influential is, perhaps, the American teenager. Think about it. While the country has always had adolescents (human beings between the ages of 12 and 18, that is), it was only in the past 50 or 60 years that it had tens of millions of semi-grownups living in a developmental buffer zone somewhere between childish innocence and adult experience.

This teenage culture of pop songs, cars and acne ointments, of proms, allowances and slumber parties is still unknown in less developed countries. And until the reform of child-labor laws in the 1930s, the spread of suburbia in the 1940s and the rise of targeted youth marketing in the '50s, it was unknown here as well. Early 20th century adolescents were farmers, apprentices, students and soldiers--perhaps even wives and husbands--but not teenagers.

Spawned by a mix of prosperity and politics, teenagers are a modern luxury good. The question for the new century is, How much longer will teenagers exist, at least in the form that James Dean made famous? Twenty years, tops, is my guess. Teenagers, as classically defined, are already dying out, or at least changing into something different. The buffer zone they once inhabited is being squeezed out of existence for two reasons: children are growing up faster than ever before, and adults are growing up more slowly.

A few random facts. In the 1800s, social historians tell us, the average girl began to menstruate at 15; now the average age is 12. According to a recent national survey, 63% of teens reported using a computer in the 30 days previous to being polled. (For adults 50 and older, by the way, the figure was a mere 20%.) Not long ago, I, a 37-year-old, suffered a lapse of Internet access that was repaired by a 16-year-old who charges $50 an hour for his expert labor and trades stocks over the Web in his spare time. By comparison, when I was 16, I worked in a gas station for pocket change and thought that all stockbrokers lived in New York City.

An adolescent with his or her own money--real money, not parental charity--is not, in any meaningful sense, a teenager, but a capitalist early bird out to get the worm. This truth informs those ads for Internet stockbrokers in which young punks with goatees and ponytails give investment advice to balding bosses or land private helicopters in their parents' backyard. Exaggerations? Forty-year-olds wish. Not when silicon billionaires like Jerry Yang of Yahoo (31 and worth more than $3 billion) have proved that the traditional interval between a boy's first shave and his first million need not be much of an interval at all. All over the nation's high-tech landscape, people are retiring within years of taking their first legal sip of alcohol. Soon they'll be retiring before driving age. This won't be a problem for them, however, because they'll be able to afford chauffeurs.